November 6, 2019 • 29 mins
Couney ran incubator sideshows, featuring premature babies. This is complicated -Couney was making money from these attractions, and his medical experience was questionable. But at the same time, premature babies weren’t getting a lot of care otherwise.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
We are just back from our Denver and Chicago leg
of our tour, and I have a little post tour
(00:25):
vocal uncertainty. Yeah, I think we're we're both in torch
song territory. Mine alternately sounds fine and then like garbage,
so brace yes. So if if you've never heard our
show before, this is maybe not what we typically sound
like all of the time. Anyway, we have gotten so
so many requests for today's topic, including one that came
(00:48):
in from our listener Alyssa while I was writing the episode.
That never happens normally. Normally, when people say have you
ever thought about doing an episode on whatever? Fill in
the blank, like ninety nine percent of the time the
answer is I don't know, maybe, like there's so much
stuff to think about. But this was a case where
she said have you ever thought of doing this? And
I was like, I'm working on it right now. So
(01:10):
way back when we heard from Angela, Dan Kristen, and
Harrison all requesting this topic, and then it briefly came
up in our past episode on the Fort Shaw Indian
School Girls basketball team, by total coincidence. After we recorded
that episode, but before it came out, the other podcast,
Saw Bones put out an episode on the topic. So
(01:30):
then we were just flooded with message about folks saying, hey,
saw Bones just did this. I lost track of everyone
requesting it. And anyway, the point is today we are
talking about Martin Cooney and his incubator sideshows which came
complete with premature babies in them. I've heard people pronounce
his names. His name a couple of different ways. I've
heard some people say County and I've heard some people
(01:53):
say Cooney, but Cooney seems to be the more common.
From a medical ethics standpoint, this is complicated. It Cooney
was turning premature babies and their care into a sideshow attraction,
and for a while he was also making a lot
of money off of that, and there are a lot
of question marks around his background and the experience that
he had and whether he was qualified to be doing
(02:15):
this at all. But at the same time, premature babies
really were not getting a lot of care otherwise, and
the general sense among the mainstream medical community was that
there was really nothing to be done for them, so
he was definitely saving babies lives, also some question marks
around what he was doing. Today. When people used the
phrase premature baby, they typically mean a baby who was
(02:36):
born before thirty seven weeks gestation, but during the time
that we're talking about today, that term was a lot
more nebulous. It did include babies who had been born
before thirty seven weeks, but it also included babies who
had a low birth weight for some other reason, along
with babies who maybe had some sort of illness, disability,
or developmental issue. And regardless of the cause, these babies
(02:59):
were often lumped together and described as weaklings, and for
the most part, doctors and hospitals in the nineteenth century
in Europe and North America just didn't provide them any
kind of specialized care. Parents were instructed to keep them
warm and to hope or pray for the best, but
that was just about it. And then underlying this was
an attitude that these babies who were not very strong
(03:21):
at their birth would just grow up to be adults
who also weren't very strong if they survived. So there
was this idea that maybe it was better to just
let nature take its course. Of course, this is an
ablest mindset and it sounds really callous today, but at
the time, instant mortality in general was quite high, even
among babies who were born at full term and seemed
(03:44):
initially to be healthy, and as we talked about in
our previous episode on Virginia Apgar, well into the twentieth century,
there was a lot more medical focus on the person
giving birth than on the newborn baby. In the nineteenth century,
the death of a baby was a tragedy, but it
was almost an expected tragedy, especially among premature babies. The
(04:05):
development that started to turn this perception around was the incubator. Historically,
people have known that babies need to be have warm,
but not too hot. This is especially true for pre
term infants who have less body fat and just aren't
able to regulate their own body temperature. As well, people
have used things like heated rocks or bricks or water bottles, blankets, candles,
(04:29):
and their own body heat to try to keep babies warm,
and there have also been cultures that recognize that premature
babies in particular needed to be kept consistently warm as
Tracy was working on this, she found an article from
back in the nineteen forties, so the language there was
really outdated, but it described native people in Siberia wrapping
babies in the skin of a seabird with the feathers
(04:50):
turned inward, and then keeping this sort of pouch that
they had created suspended over a very small flame. And
that article also discussed in did his people in Mozambique
keeping pre term babies wrapped up and placed in a
large pot that was warmed up in the sun. Both
of these techniques were essentially working as incubators, but the
(05:11):
incubator as we think of it today was first developed
in France in the nineteenth century by obstetrician Stephan Tarnier.
At the time, France as a nation was very concerned
about its birthrate, which was a lot lower than some
of its neighbors. This was leading to very practical worries
about whether France would have enough soldiers and laborers in
(05:32):
the future, so people were looking for ways not just
to increase the birth rate, but also to protect the
lives of the babies that were already being born. Turnier
got the idea after seeing incubators being used to hatch
eggs at a zoo. His first incubator was not very sophisticated.
It was basically a hot water bottle under a wooden
chamber with a glass top, but it got the job
(05:54):
done In one he tested it out in a Paris
maternity ward, focusing on bay bees who weighed less than
two thousand grahams that's a little under four and a
half pounds at birth. He reported that being kept in
the incubator cut their mortality rate in half. Although this
test went really well, Tarnier's invention wasn't really able to
(06:15):
be put into widespread use. Most babies in France were
being born at home, not in the hospital, so hospitals
set up premature baby words to receive these babies after
their parents brought them in. But most of the time
at least a day or two passed between the birth
and the arrival at the hospital, so by the time
they were admitted, these babies had been just too cold
(06:37):
for too long. Sometimes they had also contracted some kind
of illness, and so their mortality rate continued to be
quite high. In nine, physician Alexander Leon patented an improved
version of the incubator, like Tarnier's incubator. It heated a
chamber from below, but it also had a ventilation system
that drew fresh air into the incubator and a thermostat
(06:58):
to regulate the temperature. These devices were expensive, and it
was also expensive for a hospital to employ a twenty
four hour medical staff to care for the babies that
needed them. This was especially true since most people weren't
giving birth in hospitals, so for the most part, hospitals
weren't adding premature infant care to existing labor and delivery
(07:20):
wards that were already fully staffed. They were having to
start from scratch. It could be weeks or months before
these babies were ready to go home, so words for
premature infants also needed to employ wet nurses to keep
them fed. So to make this level of care affordable,
Leon established a number of premature infant charities in France's
major cities, and while those were in operation, they treated
(07:42):
as many as eight thousand infants, with roughly seventy hundred
of them surviving. These facilities were funded by charitable contributions,
by the cities where they were operating, and by the
admission fees that people paid to come and look at
these babies. These incubators soon spread outside of France, as
did the idea of putting the incubators and the babies
(08:04):
inside them on display. On May one, nineties six, the
kinder Rutenstaldt or Child Hatchery opened at the Berlin Industrial Exposition.
This included six incubators that were open for public view,
along with housing for the medical staff and the wet
nurses who were working there. Later on, Martin Cooney said
(08:24):
that the child hatchery in Berlin was where he got
his start in working with incubators and premature babies. He
said that he was from Alsace Laurent, France, and had
studied medicine at University of Leipzig before continuing his education
under the tutelage of French pediatrician Pierre Boudin. Boudin was
one of the leading authorities on the care of premature infants.
(08:46):
He even went on to write the first major textbook
on the subject, which was titled Nursling The Feeding and
Hygiene of Premature and full term Infants. So, according to Cooney,
he went to Berlin on Boudin's instruction to run the
child hatchery at the Berlin Industrial Exposition Cooney said that
it had been his idea to put these babies in
(09:06):
the incubators rather than just showcasing empty incubators as an
example of a new technology. He also said he worked
with Empress Augusta Victoria to get approval for premature babies
from Berlin's hospitals to be cared for in this exhibit.
But none of that seems to actually be true. And
we are gonna get two more about Cooney and all
(09:28):
of that after we first paused for a little sponsor break.
According to Martin Cooney's immigration documents, he was born in
Krytasian on December eighteen sixty nine. Today that's Krytocean, Poland,
(09:48):
but at the time it was in Prussia. Cooney's name
at birth was Michael Cohen. He and his family were Jewish,
as was about a third of the population of the
town where they were living. From there, his upbringing in
background get really unclear. The backstory that he told people
about when and where he was born was all over
the place. He is listed on the manifest of a
(10:10):
ship that came to the US in eighteen eighty eight
when he was nineteen, but by eighteen ninety seven he
was in London, having partnered with entrepreneurs Samuel Shanken to
create an incubator exhibition for the Victorian Era Exhibition. Although
Cooney claimed that he had studied medicine in Leipzig, which
logically would have happened between eighteen eighty eight and eighteen
(10:30):
nine seven, there's no evidence that he studied at the
University of Leipzig or at any other university in Europe,
or that he continued his studies with Pierre Boudin. There's
also no evidence that Cooney had anything to do with
the child hatchery in Berlin, although it seems as though
he and Shanken licensed that endeavor from Alexandre Lyon when
(10:51):
they started working on a similar attraction at the Victorian
Era Exhibition. When Cooney and Shanken launched the Victorian Era
Exhibition an incubator display. Incubators had been used in France
and other parts of the Western European continent for years,
but they were still pretty new in England. Attitudes about
parenting were a little different. Parents and we're just not
(11:12):
as receptive to the idea. When Cooney and Shanken had
trouble convincing parents to place their babies in the exhibition.
They brought newborns across the Channel from France under the
care of nurse Louise Recht, who spent a lot of
her career working with Cooney's exhibits. At least two hundred
thousand people visited the Incubators. As a Victorian era exhibition,
(11:34):
it got a favorable right up in the Lancet, although
the Lancets coverage of these types of exhibitions wasn't always positive.
Cooney and Shanken also wrote a letter to the Lancet
in warning of the dangers of competing shows that were
not affiliated with them and had no medical staff. Cooney's
name on this particular letter is printed as Martin Coney
(11:55):
c O n e Y. Martin Coney seems to have
evolved in Martin Cooney By the time Cooney started an
incubator exhibition at the trans Mississippi and International Exhibition, also
known as the Omaha World's Fair, that was an eight,
although at that point he hadn't changed his name legally yet.
While in Omaha, Cooney was approached by the Krug Cabinet
(12:17):
Beer Company about supplying beer for the exhibits. Wet nurses,
folks have long believed the beer can help improve milk supply,
something that seems to be connected to one of the
pol saccharides in the barley rather than to the alcohol content.
The Omaha Daily be published a quote by Dr Martin
Cooney that quote, we take pleasure in stating we have
(12:38):
used Krug cabinet bottled beer consistently for milk producing qualities.
We can cheerfully recommend it to all nursing mothers. On
November two, while still in Omaha, Cooney was naturalized as
a US citizen. At that time, he justified that he
had been living in Nebraska continually for the previous ten years,
and that was clearly not true since at minimum he
(13:01):
had been in London for the Victorian Exhibition. Cooney's next
major exhibition was the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo in
nineteen o one, which had eighteen incubators. By that point,
at least one hospital was also trying to use incubators
for premature infant care. That was Chicago Lying In Hospital,
where an incubator station was opened in nineteen hundred by
(13:23):
Joseph B. De Lee. This station had some of the
same struggles as the first French hospitals using incubators did
back in the eighteen eighties, they were expensive to buy,
run and staff, and most of the babies who needed
them were being born at home. By contrast, the attraction
at the expo went very well, although the exposition itself
was marred by the assassination of President McKinley. In nineteen
(13:46):
o three, Cooney started the baby exhibit that he's most
famous for. It was his first permanent exhibition at Luna
Park on Coney Island. This was permanent and that he
continued to run it for decades, but the park itself
was seasonal, so during the winter months, any babies who
were still there were either sent home or to hospitals
along with their incubators, and any incubators not in use
(14:08):
were put into storage. The Luna Park exhibition was similar
to all of Cooney's previous exhibitions. It had space for
the incubators themselves, which people could view through a window
after buying a ticket. The space had housing for the
medical staff and the wet nurses. The staff included Dr.
Solomon Fishel and nurses Louise Wrecht and Annabelle Signer, but
(14:29):
unlike earlier exhibits. This one also had an exam room
that was also viewable through a window, so in addition
to seeing the babies and their incubators, the audience would
also see there's some of their medical examinations and other care.
Their parents weren't charged anything for the baby's care, and
no premature baby was turned away. The incubator displays had
(14:50):
always had kind of an educational component, explaining what the
incubators were and how they worked and why the babies
needed them, and this continued at Luna Park as well.
For the most part, the care that the babies were
getting was pretty basic. Even when Pierre Budan's textbook on
Premature Infant care was published in nineteen one, most of
its guidelines boiled down to keeping the baby warm and
(15:11):
fed and preventing infections. Breast milk was the ideal food,
which is why there were wet nurses on staff. If
breast milk was not available for some reason, sterilized cow's
milk could be used as a substitute. For babies who
were too weak to suckle, the nurses used droppers or
tubes into the stomach or through the nose. At the
same time, this was definitely a carnival attraction. It was
(15:35):
located on a boardwalk in an amusement park. Although Coarney
had strict rules for cleanliness and hygiene and the diets
of the wet nurses, the surrounding area was noisy and dirty.
Sometimes the exhibits around the babies were a little racy.
The staff also included barkers who tried to draw in
an audience from outside, and people who sold tickets for
(15:55):
twenty five cents apiece, and there was definitely some theatricality
involved in the display itself. The babies were often dressed
in clothes that were too big for them, with an
oversized bow around their middle, and that made them look
even smaller than they already were. Nurse Wrecked was fond
of putting a diamond ring from her index finger around
a baby's wrist, where it would dangle like a bracelet.
(16:17):
Even though Cooney was providing life saving care to these
premature infants, and even though everyone seems to have taken
as fact that he really was a medical doctor, the
Luna Park exhibit drew a lot of criticism. On August
nine oh three, an article in The New York Times
accused Cooney of running a baby farm. John D. Lindsay,
(16:38):
who was president of the New York Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children, became an outspoken critic of
Cooney and of baby side shows. Eventually, the matter went
to court, and Cooney testified that he had saved fifty
of the fifty two babies he was brought in Buffalo,
and so far eighteen of the nineteen babies brought to
him in New York. The Luna Park side show was
(17:00):
allowed to continue. On August thirty one, nineteen o three,
Michael Cohen legally changed his name to Martin Arthur Cooney.
A little less than a month later, on September twenty six,
he married nurse Annabelle Segner, who continued to work with
him at the baby exhibit. In nineteen o four, the
Luna Park Nurse reopened for the season, and another location
(17:21):
virtually identical opened it, Dreamland Amusement Park, which was also
on Coney Island. A third amusement park location later opened
in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Throughout all of this, other
people were continuing to use incubators with living babies as
exhibits and sideshows, and fairs and expositions people who didn't
have anything to do with Martin Cooney. Cooney wrote about
(17:44):
these as inferior imitations of his own idea, even though
it really seems like he lifted this idea from Alexander Leon.
Some of these other exhibits ran without incident, but in
nineteen o four, disaster struck at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition
him also called the St. Louis World's Fair. This was
the one that we talked about in our previous episode
(18:05):
on the Fort Shaw Indian schoolgirls basketball team. There was
an outbreak of diarrhea in the exhibit and the mortality
rate at the exhibit approached. A doctor was brought in
to take charge, and Cooney was careful distress that he
had not had anything to do with that exhibit. Although
Cooney continued to arrange and run baby incubator attractions and expositions,
(18:27):
the amusement park locations were really a big part of
the rest of his career, and we'll get into more
of that after another quick sponsor break. In the years
after Martin Cooney arranged his first incubator attraction, he started
holding periodic reunions which would bring together babies and young
(18:50):
children who had spent their early months in one of
his incubators, now, of course, thriving and healthy. The large
majority of premature infants that he cared for went on
to grow and thrive. At the same time, his whole
career was full of ups and downs. For example, in
nineteen o five, the Infant Incubator Company was established, with
Cooney's colleagues Dr. Solomon Fishel and Samuel Shanken as co directors.
(19:15):
That same year, the New York Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Children try to lobby for legislation that
would make the exhibition of babies in incubators a misdemeanor.
On January twenty nine seven, Cooney's wife, Annabelle, gave birth
to a daughter, about six weeks early. Since it was January,
the amusement parks were closed for the season, so Cooney
(19:36):
got somebody to retrieve one of the exhibit incubators from storage.
This daughter, Hilda guard Francis, survived her infancy and went
on to become a nurse working in her father's exhibits.
She was also dogged by rumors that she wasn't actually
Martin and Annabel's child, but was a premature baby that
somebody else had abandoned. On May nineteen eleven, a fire
(19:58):
broke out at Dreamland Amusement Park. As always, there were
staff members on duty at the incubator exhibition, which was
successfully evacuated, but The New York Times published an incorrect
report saying that all of the babies had been killed.
John D. Lindsay used this as fodder to renew his
criticisms of the side shows, although they did continue to operate.
(20:19):
In nineteen fourteen, Cooney established an incubator display at White
City Amusement Park in Chicago, and there he met Dr
Julius Hess. Hess would go on to established the first
dedicated intensive care unit for premature infants in the United States.
Hess didn't really approve of the theatricality that was involved
with Cooney's exhibits, but he really regarded Cooney as a
(20:41):
friend and a colleague. When Hess published his textbook, Premature
and Condenitally Diseased Infants, he had Cooney review it beforehand
and acknowledged his contributions when it was published. Has also
dedicated another book to Cooney, In Night Together. Hess and
Cooney planned a state of the Art Incubator for facility
for the Chicago Century of Progress in nineteen thirty three.
(21:04):
While Cooney's earlier incubator exhibits had included some education, this
was more like a functioning research institute, with the staff
specifically studying the care the babies were receiving and its
effects and outcomes. Hess and Cooney's medical teams were both involved,
so each team learned from the other. At about the
same time, more hospitals were starting to establish dedicated facilities
(21:27):
for pre term infant care, so this work being done
at the Century of Progress was contributing to a growing
medical field. The next year, in four, William Randolph Hurst
approached Cooney with a request to travel to Canada, where
Quinn tuplets had been born in Ontario. These five babies
came to be known as the Dion Quinns, and Cooney
(21:48):
declined to get involved with their care. The reason that
he gave publicly was that his existing patients needed him
he just didn't have time with his other work, but
it was also because he didn't think these babies were
likely to survive, and his experience in cases of multiple
births at most only one baby survived all five of
(22:08):
the dion quintuplets did survive their infancy, and we have
gotten a lot of request to talk about them on
the podcast. It's kind of like the never ending request
loin Um. But two of them are still living and
we don't generally do biographies of living persons. And they
have also said pretty clearly that they just want their privacy,
and a big part of their story is their privacy
(22:29):
being taken away from them from their infancy and Childhood's uh,
that is why we are not doing an episode on
the dion quintuplets. So, yes, it is fascinating and we
understand the curiosity, but we're respecting their privacy. They've pretty
clearly said they would just like to be left alone.
In the late nineteen thirties, things were pretty difficult for Cooney.
His wife, Annabel died. He was also aware of events
(22:52):
in Germany as Hitler came to power, and he knew
that his Jewish friends and family in Europe were at
great risk. During the late eighteen thirties, he arranged for
about fifteen people to leave Europe, paying their way and
handling their paperwork. Then Cooney tried to arrange another incubators
side show at the New York World's Fair in nineteen
thirty nine, but by this point the novelty of incubators
(23:15):
had started to wear off. The exhibit just didn't draw
the kinds of crowds that previous efforts had, and for
the first time, Cooney lost money. The show was renewed
for a second season, with Cooney hoping that he could
make up for the earlier loss, but the opposite happened.
The whole thing was financially disastrous. That was not going
well at this point for the more permanent locations either,
(23:37):
and the two remaining amusement park attractions, which were at
Luna Park and Atlantic City, both closed in nineteen forty three.
At that point Cooney retired. Also, more and more premature
care wards were opening around the United States by this point.
It was something that paused a little during World War Two,
but then resumed afterward. Cooney died on March first, nineteen
fifty He had become known at that as the Incubator Doctor,
(24:01):
and it's estimated that during his career, his exhibitions cared
for at least eight thousand babies and saved the lives
of at least six thousand five hundred of them, but
when talking about it to the media, he always stressed
that he shouldn't get all the credit, that the doctors, nurses,
and wet nurses on staff were critical to the work.
Cooney's legacy is really complicated. There are just so many
(24:23):
holes and some outright falsehoods in the back story that
he told people about himself, and we really have no
idea what his credentials were when he started his first exhibit.
There's just no documentation that he had the medical degree
that he said he had. Although we could logically conclude
that he changed his name to try to avoid anti Semitism,
(24:44):
we don't actually know what motivated him to do it
or why he was just so cagy and inconsistent about
what his background was. But he definitely dedicated most of
his adult life to taking care of babies that doctors
didn't think could or should be help, and thanks to
his work, the public perception of premature babies also started
to shift away from this idea of hopeless weaklings who
(25:08):
might be better off if they were allowed to die
two fighters who could thrive if they just had the
right kind of care. Some writers have framed Cooney's work
as an opposition to the eugenics movement. And while it's
true that the eugenics movement approved of the idea of
allowing the so called weak to quote die out, Cooney
also reinforced some of that same mindset with how he
(25:31):
talked about these babies. He's stressed that they were going
to grow up quote healthy and normal and not to
be weaklings. He implied that if they were going to
grow up to be ill or disabled, he wouldn't be
doing what he was doing. There are also arguments about
whether Coney's use of incubators as a sideshow attraction delayed
their mainstream medical acceptance. That was a little harder to
(25:54):
pin down. On the one hand, as Cooney and his
staff were working with these children, they were learning and
developing new skills and getting better at it over time
and influencing the work of some of the United States
earliest neonatologists. But it is also entirely possible that doctors
just didn't want to be associated with something that was
so closely connected to sideshows and amusement parks, and that
(26:16):
it made the whole technology seem a little bit suspicious.
And of course there have been huge advances in premature
baby care since Cooney's death There largely outside the scope
of this podcast, but especially for babies born very early,
it's no longer a matter of just trying to keep
them warm and fed in preventing illnesses, there are a
lot of other medical interventions that can take place, and
(26:38):
that has led to a whole other ethical debate about
when to resuscitate premature babies and what level of care
and intervention that they should receive. That's Martin Cooney and
his Baby Side Shows. You're fascinating and also kind of
complicated topic. Yeah. Uh, do you have a little bit
of listener mail that may or may not be fascinating
(26:58):
and complicated? I do it. It is from Celeste, and
Celeste says, Hello, Tracy and Holly. I love the podcast
and I'm so glad that there's something I can talk
to you guys about. While it's not my favorite color,
the color blue is such a fascinating color. A couple
of years ago, I watched this video on YouTube called
why is blue so Rare in Nature? It's a really
(27:20):
interesting video talking about said question. They talk about how
it's so rare to find a pure blue in nature
and They also talk about the few examples of blue
in nature, like a peacock feather, the blue monarch butterfly,
and more. They talked about why these things have such
a strong blue color. I recommend you guys watch it, uh,
and then Celeste follows with several uh different topics for
(27:43):
future episodes. I would like to say thank you so
much Celest for writing this letter. I hope I have
pronounced it correctly, UH the name Celest because I noticed
there is an accent mark in it that I hope
I am rendering correctly anyway, UM, I will put a
link or I will ask Colleige, because Holly is the
person who sets up our actual episodes for a publication.
(28:05):
UH to you put a link to this video in
the show notes, because this is a really interesting video. UM.
It is from PBS Digital Studios, and it basically talks
about how a lot of the blue butterflies and uh
and feathers and things like that that we see in
nature aren't blue because of a blue pigment. They're blue
(28:25):
because of the way the light reflects off of the
physical structure of like the wings, which is really cool
and we did not really get into that in our
mysteries of the color blue. It all so thank you
again so much for sending that. If you would like
to write to us, where a history podcast at how
stuff Works dot com and then we're all over social
media as Missed in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter,
(28:48):
and Instagram. You can come to our website which is
Missed in History dot com and find the show notes
for the episodes Holly and I have done together, and
then archive of all the episodes ever and you can
subscribe to our show on Apple, podcast, the I heart
radio app, and wherever else we get podcasts. Stuff you
(29:09):
Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart
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you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.
We are just back from our Denver and Chicago leg
of our tour, and I have a little post tour
(00:25):
vocal uncertainty. Yeah, I think we're we're both in torch
song territory. Mine alternately sounds fine and then like garbage,
so brace yes. So if if you've never heard our
show before, this is maybe not what we typically sound
like all of the time. Anyway, we have gotten so
so many requests for today's topic, including one that came
(00:48):
in from our listener Alyssa while I was writing the episode.
That never happens normally. Normally, when people say have you
ever thought about doing an episode on whatever? Fill in
the blank, like ninety nine percent of the time the
answer is I don't know, maybe, like there's so much
stuff to think about. But this was a case where
she said have you ever thought of doing this? And
I was like, I'm working on it right now. So
(01:10):
way back when we heard from Angela, Dan Kristen, and
Harrison all requesting this topic, and then it briefly came
up in our past episode on the Fort Shaw Indian
School Girls basketball team, by total coincidence. After we recorded
that episode, but before it came out, the other podcast,
Saw Bones put out an episode on the topic. So
(01:30):
then we were just flooded with message about folks saying, hey,
saw Bones just did this. I lost track of everyone
requesting it. And anyway, the point is today we are
talking about Martin Cooney and his incubator sideshows which came
complete with premature babies in them. I've heard people pronounce
his names. His name a couple of different ways. I've
heard some people say County and I've heard some people
(01:53):
say Cooney, but Cooney seems to be the more common.
From a medical ethics standpoint, this is complicated. It Cooney
was turning premature babies and their care into a sideshow attraction,
and for a while he was also making a lot
of money off of that, and there are a lot
of question marks around his background and the experience that
he had and whether he was qualified to be doing
(02:15):
this at all. But at the same time, premature babies
really were not getting a lot of care otherwise, and
the general sense among the mainstream medical community was that
there was really nothing to be done for them, so
he was definitely saving babies lives, also some question marks
around what he was doing. Today. When people used the
phrase premature baby, they typically mean a baby who was
(02:36):
born before thirty seven weeks gestation, but during the time
that we're talking about today, that term was a lot
more nebulous. It did include babies who had been born
before thirty seven weeks, but it also included babies who
had a low birth weight for some other reason, along
with babies who maybe had some sort of illness, disability,
or developmental issue. And regardless of the cause, these babies
(02:59):
were often lumped together and described as weaklings, and for
the most part, doctors and hospitals in the nineteenth century
in Europe and North America just didn't provide them any
kind of specialized care. Parents were instructed to keep them
warm and to hope or pray for the best, but
that was just about it. And then underlying this was
an attitude that these babies who were not very strong
(03:21):
at their birth would just grow up to be adults
who also weren't very strong if they survived. So there
was this idea that maybe it was better to just
let nature take its course. Of course, this is an
ablest mindset and it sounds really callous today, but at
the time, instant mortality in general was quite high, even
among babies who were born at full term and seemed
(03:44):
initially to be healthy, and as we talked about in
our previous episode on Virginia Apgar, well into the twentieth century,
there was a lot more medical focus on the person
giving birth than on the newborn baby. In the nineteenth century,
the death of a baby was a tragedy, but it
was almost an expected tragedy, especially among premature babies. The
(04:05):
development that started to turn this perception around was the incubator. Historically,
people have known that babies need to be have warm,
but not too hot. This is especially true for pre
term infants who have less body fat and just aren't
able to regulate their own body temperature. As well, people
have used things like heated rocks or bricks or water bottles, blankets, candles,
(04:29):
and their own body heat to try to keep babies warm,
and there have also been cultures that recognize that premature
babies in particular needed to be kept consistently warm as
Tracy was working on this, she found an article from
back in the nineteen forties, so the language there was
really outdated, but it described native people in Siberia wrapping
babies in the skin of a seabird with the feathers
(04:50):
turned inward, and then keeping this sort of pouch that
they had created suspended over a very small flame. And
that article also discussed in did his people in Mozambique
keeping pre term babies wrapped up and placed in a
large pot that was warmed up in the sun. Both
of these techniques were essentially working as incubators, but the
(05:11):
incubator as we think of it today was first developed
in France in the nineteenth century by obstetrician Stephan Tarnier.
At the time, France as a nation was very concerned
about its birthrate, which was a lot lower than some
of its neighbors. This was leading to very practical worries
about whether France would have enough soldiers and laborers in
(05:32):
the future, so people were looking for ways not just
to increase the birth rate, but also to protect the
lives of the babies that were already being born. Turnier
got the idea after seeing incubators being used to hatch
eggs at a zoo. His first incubator was not very sophisticated.
It was basically a hot water bottle under a wooden
chamber with a glass top, but it got the job
(05:54):
done In one he tested it out in a Paris
maternity ward, focusing on bay bees who weighed less than
two thousand grahams that's a little under four and a
half pounds at birth. He reported that being kept in
the incubator cut their mortality rate in half. Although this
test went really well, Tarnier's invention wasn't really able to
(06:15):
be put into widespread use. Most babies in France were
being born at home, not in the hospital, so hospitals
set up premature baby words to receive these babies after
their parents brought them in. But most of the time
at least a day or two passed between the birth
and the arrival at the hospital, so by the time
they were admitted, these babies had been just too cold
(06:37):
for too long. Sometimes they had also contracted some kind
of illness, and so their mortality rate continued to be
quite high. In nine, physician Alexander Leon patented an improved
version of the incubator, like Tarnier's incubator. It heated a
chamber from below, but it also had a ventilation system
that drew fresh air into the incubator and a thermostat
(06:58):
to regulate the temperature. These devices were expensive, and it
was also expensive for a hospital to employ a twenty
four hour medical staff to care for the babies that
needed them. This was especially true since most people weren't
giving birth in hospitals, so for the most part, hospitals
weren't adding premature infant care to existing labor and delivery
(07:20):
wards that were already fully staffed. They were having to
start from scratch. It could be weeks or months before
these babies were ready to go home, so words for
premature infants also needed to employ wet nurses to keep
them fed. So to make this level of care affordable,
Leon established a number of premature infant charities in France's
major cities, and while those were in operation, they treated
(07:42):
as many as eight thousand infants, with roughly seventy hundred
of them surviving. These facilities were funded by charitable contributions,
by the cities where they were operating, and by the
admission fees that people paid to come and look at
these babies. These incubators soon spread outside of France, as
did the idea of putting the incubators and the babies
(08:04):
inside them on display. On May one, nineties six, the
kinder Rutenstaldt or Child Hatchery opened at the Berlin Industrial Exposition.
This included six incubators that were open for public view,
along with housing for the medical staff and the wet
nurses who were working there. Later on, Martin Cooney said
(08:24):
that the child hatchery in Berlin was where he got
his start in working with incubators and premature babies. He
said that he was from Alsace Laurent, France, and had
studied medicine at University of Leipzig before continuing his education
under the tutelage of French pediatrician Pierre Boudin. Boudin was
one of the leading authorities on the care of premature infants.
(08:46):
He even went on to write the first major textbook
on the subject, which was titled Nursling The Feeding and
Hygiene of Premature and full term Infants. So, according to Cooney,
he went to Berlin on Boudin's instruction to run the
child hatchery at the Berlin Industrial Exposition Cooney said that
it had been his idea to put these babies in
(09:06):
the incubators rather than just showcasing empty incubators as an
example of a new technology. He also said he worked
with Empress Augusta Victoria to get approval for premature babies
from Berlin's hospitals to be cared for in this exhibit.
But none of that seems to actually be true. And
we are gonna get two more about Cooney and all
(09:28):
of that after we first paused for a little sponsor break.
According to Martin Cooney's immigration documents, he was born in
Krytasian on December eighteen sixty nine. Today that's Krytocean, Poland,
(09:48):
but at the time it was in Prussia. Cooney's name
at birth was Michael Cohen. He and his family were Jewish,
as was about a third of the population of the
town where they were living. From there, his upbringing in
background get really unclear. The backstory that he told people
about when and where he was born was all over
the place. He is listed on the manifest of a
(10:10):
ship that came to the US in eighteen eighty eight
when he was nineteen, but by eighteen ninety seven he
was in London, having partnered with entrepreneurs Samuel Shanken to
create an incubator exhibition for the Victorian Era Exhibition. Although
Cooney claimed that he had studied medicine in Leipzig, which
logically would have happened between eighteen eighty eight and eighteen
(10:30):
nine seven, there's no evidence that he studied at the
University of Leipzig or at any other university in Europe,
or that he continued his studies with Pierre Boudin. There's
also no evidence that Cooney had anything to do with
the child hatchery in Berlin, although it seems as though
he and Shanken licensed that endeavor from Alexandre Lyon when
(10:51):
they started working on a similar attraction at the Victorian
Era Exhibition. When Cooney and Shanken launched the Victorian Era
Exhibition an incubator display. Incubators had been used in France
and other parts of the Western European continent for years,
but they were still pretty new in England. Attitudes about
parenting were a little different. Parents and we're just not
(11:12):
as receptive to the idea. When Cooney and Shanken had
trouble convincing parents to place their babies in the exhibition.
They brought newborns across the Channel from France under the
care of nurse Louise Recht, who spent a lot of
her career working with Cooney's exhibits. At least two hundred
thousand people visited the Incubators. As a Victorian era exhibition,
(11:34):
it got a favorable right up in the Lancet, although
the Lancets coverage of these types of exhibitions wasn't always positive.
Cooney and Shanken also wrote a letter to the Lancet
in warning of the dangers of competing shows that were
not affiliated with them and had no medical staff. Cooney's
name on this particular letter is printed as Martin Coney
(11:55):
c O n e Y. Martin Coney seems to have
evolved in Martin Cooney By the time Cooney started an
incubator exhibition at the trans Mississippi and International Exhibition, also
known as the Omaha World's Fair, that was an eight,
although at that point he hadn't changed his name legally yet.
While in Omaha, Cooney was approached by the Krug Cabinet
(12:17):
Beer Company about supplying beer for the exhibits. Wet nurses,
folks have long believed the beer can help improve milk supply,
something that seems to be connected to one of the
pol saccharides in the barley rather than to the alcohol content.
The Omaha Daily be published a quote by Dr Martin
Cooney that quote, we take pleasure in stating we have
(12:38):
used Krug cabinet bottled beer consistently for milk producing qualities.
We can cheerfully recommend it to all nursing mothers. On
November two, while still in Omaha, Cooney was naturalized as
a US citizen. At that time, he justified that he
had been living in Nebraska continually for the previous ten years,
and that was clearly not true since at minimum he
(13:01):
had been in London for the Victorian Exhibition. Cooney's next
major exhibition was the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo in
nineteen o one, which had eighteen incubators. By that point,
at least one hospital was also trying to use incubators
for premature infant care. That was Chicago Lying In Hospital,
where an incubator station was opened in nineteen hundred by
(13:23):
Joseph B. De Lee. This station had some of the
same struggles as the first French hospitals using incubators did
back in the eighteen eighties, they were expensive to buy,
run and staff, and most of the babies who needed
them were being born at home. By contrast, the attraction
at the expo went very well, although the exposition itself
was marred by the assassination of President McKinley. In nineteen
(13:46):
o three, Cooney started the baby exhibit that he's most
famous for. It was his first permanent exhibition at Luna
Park on Coney Island. This was permanent and that he
continued to run it for decades, but the park itself
was seasonal, so during the winter months, any babies who
were still there were either sent home or to hospitals
along with their incubators, and any incubators not in use
(14:08):
were put into storage. The Luna Park exhibition was similar
to all of Cooney's previous exhibitions. It had space for
the incubators themselves, which people could view through a window
after buying a ticket. The space had housing for the
medical staff and the wet nurses. The staff included Dr.
Solomon Fishel and nurses Louise Wrecht and Annabelle Signer, but
(14:29):
unlike earlier exhibits. This one also had an exam room
that was also viewable through a window, so in addition
to seeing the babies and their incubators, the audience would
also see there's some of their medical examinations and other care.
Their parents weren't charged anything for the baby's care, and
no premature baby was turned away. The incubator displays had
(14:50):
always had kind of an educational component, explaining what the
incubators were and how they worked and why the babies
needed them, and this continued at Luna Park as well.
For the most part, the care that the babies were
getting was pretty basic. Even when Pierre Budan's textbook on
Premature Infant care was published in nineteen one, most of
its guidelines boiled down to keeping the baby warm and
(15:11):
fed and preventing infections. Breast milk was the ideal food,
which is why there were wet nurses on staff. If
breast milk was not available for some reason, sterilized cow's
milk could be used as a substitute. For babies who
were too weak to suckle, the nurses used droppers or
tubes into the stomach or through the nose. At the
same time, this was definitely a carnival attraction. It was
(15:35):
located on a boardwalk in an amusement park. Although Coarney
had strict rules for cleanliness and hygiene and the diets
of the wet nurses, the surrounding area was noisy and dirty.
Sometimes the exhibits around the babies were a little racy.
The staff also included barkers who tried to draw in
an audience from outside, and people who sold tickets for
(15:55):
twenty five cents apiece, and there was definitely some theatricality
involved in the display itself. The babies were often dressed
in clothes that were too big for them, with an
oversized bow around their middle, and that made them look
even smaller than they already were. Nurse Wrecked was fond
of putting a diamond ring from her index finger around
a baby's wrist, where it would dangle like a bracelet.
(16:17):
Even though Cooney was providing life saving care to these
premature infants, and even though everyone seems to have taken
as fact that he really was a medical doctor, the
Luna Park exhibit drew a lot of criticism. On August
nine oh three, an article in The New York Times
accused Cooney of running a baby farm. John D. Lindsay,
(16:38):
who was president of the New York Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children, became an outspoken critic of
Cooney and of baby side shows. Eventually, the matter went
to court, and Cooney testified that he had saved fifty
of the fifty two babies he was brought in Buffalo,
and so far eighteen of the nineteen babies brought to
him in New York. The Luna Park side show was
(17:00):
allowed to continue. On August thirty one, nineteen o three,
Michael Cohen legally changed his name to Martin Arthur Cooney.
A little less than a month later, on September twenty six,
he married nurse Annabelle Segner, who continued to work with
him at the baby exhibit. In nineteen o four, the
Luna Park Nurse reopened for the season, and another location
(17:21):
virtually identical opened it, Dreamland Amusement Park, which was also
on Coney Island. A third amusement park location later opened
in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Throughout all of this, other
people were continuing to use incubators with living babies as
exhibits and sideshows, and fairs and expositions people who didn't
have anything to do with Martin Cooney. Cooney wrote about
(17:44):
these as inferior imitations of his own idea, even though
it really seems like he lifted this idea from Alexander Leon.
Some of these other exhibits ran without incident, but in
nineteen o four, disaster struck at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition
him also called the St. Louis World's Fair. This was
the one that we talked about in our previous episode
(18:05):
on the Fort Shaw Indian schoolgirls basketball team. There was
an outbreak of diarrhea in the exhibit and the mortality
rate at the exhibit approached. A doctor was brought in
to take charge, and Cooney was careful distress that he
had not had anything to do with that exhibit. Although
Cooney continued to arrange and run baby incubator attractions and expositions,
(18:27):
the amusement park locations were really a big part of
the rest of his career, and we'll get into more
of that after another quick sponsor break. In the years
after Martin Cooney arranged his first incubator attraction, he started
holding periodic reunions which would bring together babies and young
(18:50):
children who had spent their early months in one of
his incubators, now, of course, thriving and healthy. The large
majority of premature infants that he cared for went on
to grow and thrive. At the same time, his whole
career was full of ups and downs. For example, in
nineteen o five, the Infant Incubator Company was established, with
Cooney's colleagues Dr. Solomon Fishel and Samuel Shanken as co directors.
(19:15):
That same year, the New York Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Children try to lobby for legislation that
would make the exhibition of babies in incubators a misdemeanor.
On January twenty nine seven, Cooney's wife, Annabelle, gave birth
to a daughter, about six weeks early. Since it was January,
the amusement parks were closed for the season, so Cooney
(19:36):
got somebody to retrieve one of the exhibit incubators from storage.
This daughter, Hilda guard Francis, survived her infancy and went
on to become a nurse working in her father's exhibits.
She was also dogged by rumors that she wasn't actually
Martin and Annabel's child, but was a premature baby that
somebody else had abandoned. On May nineteen eleven, a fire
(19:58):
broke out at Dreamland Amusement Park. As always, there were
staff members on duty at the incubator exhibition, which was
successfully evacuated, but The New York Times published an incorrect
report saying that all of the babies had been killed.
John D. Lindsay used this as fodder to renew his
criticisms of the side shows, although they did continue to operate.
(20:19):
In nineteen fourteen, Cooney established an incubator display at White
City Amusement Park in Chicago, and there he met Dr
Julius Hess. Hess would go on to established the first
dedicated intensive care unit for premature infants in the United States.
Hess didn't really approve of the theatricality that was involved
with Cooney's exhibits, but he really regarded Cooney as a
(20:41):
friend and a colleague. When Hess published his textbook, Premature
and Condenitally Diseased Infants, he had Cooney review it beforehand
and acknowledged his contributions when it was published. Has also
dedicated another book to Cooney, In Night Together. Hess and
Cooney planned a state of the Art Incubator for facility
for the Chicago Century of Progress in nineteen thirty three.
(21:04):
While Cooney's earlier incubator exhibits had included some education, this
was more like a functioning research institute, with the staff
specifically studying the care the babies were receiving and its
effects and outcomes. Hess and Cooney's medical teams were both involved,
so each team learned from the other. At about the
same time, more hospitals were starting to establish dedicated facilities
(21:27):
for pre term infant care, so this work being done
at the Century of Progress was contributing to a growing
medical field. The next year, in four, William Randolph Hurst
approached Cooney with a request to travel to Canada, where
Quinn tuplets had been born in Ontario. These five babies
came to be known as the Dion Quinns, and Cooney
(21:48):
declined to get involved with their care. The reason that
he gave publicly was that his existing patients needed him
he just didn't have time with his other work, but
it was also because he didn't think these babies were
likely to survive, and his experience in cases of multiple
births at most only one baby survived all five of
(22:08):
the dion quintuplets did survive their infancy, and we have
gotten a lot of request to talk about them on
the podcast. It's kind of like the never ending request
loin Um. But two of them are still living and
we don't generally do biographies of living persons. And they
have also said pretty clearly that they just want their privacy,
and a big part of their story is their privacy
(22:29):
being taken away from them from their infancy and Childhood's uh,
that is why we are not doing an episode on
the dion quintuplets. So, yes, it is fascinating and we
understand the curiosity, but we're respecting their privacy. They've pretty
clearly said they would just like to be left alone.
In the late nineteen thirties, things were pretty difficult for Cooney.
His wife, Annabel died. He was also aware of events
(22:52):
in Germany as Hitler came to power, and he knew
that his Jewish friends and family in Europe were at
great risk. During the late eighteen thirties, he arranged for
about fifteen people to leave Europe, paying their way and
handling their paperwork. Then Cooney tried to arrange another incubators
side show at the New York World's Fair in nineteen
thirty nine, but by this point the novelty of incubators
(23:15):
had started to wear off. The exhibit just didn't draw
the kinds of crowds that previous efforts had, and for
the first time, Cooney lost money. The show was renewed
for a second season, with Cooney hoping that he could
make up for the earlier loss, but the opposite happened.
The whole thing was financially disastrous. That was not going
well at this point for the more permanent locations either,
(23:37):
and the two remaining amusement park attractions, which were at
Luna Park and Atlantic City, both closed in nineteen forty three.
At that point Cooney retired. Also, more and more premature
care wards were opening around the United States by this point.
It was something that paused a little during World War Two,
but then resumed afterward. Cooney died on March first, nineteen
fifty He had become known at that as the Incubator Doctor,
(24:01):
and it's estimated that during his career, his exhibitions cared
for at least eight thousand babies and saved the lives
of at least six thousand five hundred of them, but
when talking about it to the media, he always stressed
that he shouldn't get all the credit, that the doctors, nurses,
and wet nurses on staff were critical to the work.
Cooney's legacy is really complicated. There are just so many
(24:23):
holes and some outright falsehoods in the back story that
he told people about himself, and we really have no
idea what his credentials were when he started his first exhibit.
There's just no documentation that he had the medical degree
that he said he had. Although we could logically conclude
that he changed his name to try to avoid anti Semitism,
(24:44):
we don't actually know what motivated him to do it
or why he was just so cagy and inconsistent about
what his background was. But he definitely dedicated most of
his adult life to taking care of babies that doctors
didn't think could or should be help, and thanks to
his work, the public perception of premature babies also started
to shift away from this idea of hopeless weaklings who
(25:08):
might be better off if they were allowed to die
two fighters who could thrive if they just had the
right kind of care. Some writers have framed Cooney's work
as an opposition to the eugenics movement. And while it's
true that the eugenics movement approved of the idea of
allowing the so called weak to quote die out, Cooney
also reinforced some of that same mindset with how he
(25:31):
talked about these babies. He's stressed that they were going
to grow up quote healthy and normal and not to
be weaklings. He implied that if they were going to
grow up to be ill or disabled, he wouldn't be
doing what he was doing. There are also arguments about
whether Coney's use of incubators as a sideshow attraction delayed
their mainstream medical acceptance. That was a little harder to
(25:54):
pin down. On the one hand, as Cooney and his
staff were working with these children, they were learning and
developing new skills and getting better at it over time
and influencing the work of some of the United States
earliest neonatologists. But it is also entirely possible that doctors
just didn't want to be associated with something that was
so closely connected to sideshows and amusement parks, and that
(26:16):
it made the whole technology seem a little bit suspicious.
And of course there have been huge advances in premature
baby care since Cooney's death There largely outside the scope
of this podcast, but especially for babies born very early,
it's no longer a matter of just trying to keep
them warm and fed in preventing illnesses, there are a
lot of other medical interventions that can take place, and
(26:38):
that has led to a whole other ethical debate about
when to resuscitate premature babies and what level of care
and intervention that they should receive. That's Martin Cooney and
his Baby Side Shows. You're fascinating and also kind of
complicated topic. Yeah. Uh, do you have a little bit
of listener mail that may or may not be fascinating
(26:58):
and complicated? I do it. It is from Celeste, and
Celeste says, Hello, Tracy and Holly. I love the podcast
and I'm so glad that there's something I can talk
to you guys about. While it's not my favorite color,
the color blue is such a fascinating color. A couple
of years ago, I watched this video on YouTube called
why is blue so Rare in Nature? It's a really
(27:20):
interesting video talking about said question. They talk about how
it's so rare to find a pure blue in nature
and They also talk about the few examples of blue
in nature, like a peacock feather, the blue monarch butterfly,
and more. They talked about why these things have such
a strong blue color. I recommend you guys watch it, uh,
and then Celeste follows with several uh different topics for
(27:43):
future episodes. I would like to say thank you so
much Celest for writing this letter. I hope I have
pronounced it correctly, UH the name Celest because I noticed
there is an accent mark in it that I hope
I am rendering correctly anyway, UM, I will put a
link or I will ask Colleige, because Holly is the
person who sets up our actual episodes for a publication.
(28:05):
UH to you put a link to this video in
the show notes, because this is a really interesting video. UM.
It is from PBS Digital Studios, and it basically talks
about how a lot of the blue butterflies and uh
and feathers and things like that that we see in
nature aren't blue because of a blue pigment. They're blue
(28:25):
because of the way the light reflects off of the
physical structure of like the wings, which is really cool
and we did not really get into that in our
mysteries of the color blue. It all so thank you
again so much for sending that. If you would like
to write to us, where a history podcast at how
stuff Works dot com and then we're all over social
media as Missed in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter,
(28:48):
and Instagram. You can come to our website which is
Missed in History dot com and find the show notes
for the episodes Holly and I have done together, and
then archive of all the episodes ever and you can
subscribe to our show on Apple, podcast, the I heart
radio app, and wherever else we get podcasts. Stuff you
(29:09):
Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart
Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
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Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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